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Wednesday, December 5, 2012

Last month Mollie from Wild Olive put out a call on twitter for people to stitch up a secret design that was to be part of the Christmas celebrations on her blog. I had finally finished sewing together the Nativity figures for our in-law's Christmas present and was looking for some embroidery to do next so I put up my hand.

Mollie sent me the pattern and here's my result. Details about the give away below.

Stitch and colour choice were up to me. I adore rainbows so I decided to go with 6 different colours for Heaven.

Nature is stitched with a gorgeous blue/green cotton colour way I picked up from Lincraft last time I was in Penrith. I thought it went perfectly with the word nature.
For the words Heaven and nature I used back stitch.

For Sing I decided to use three single threads of three different gold colours spliced together to get a nice rich tone with highlights and lowlights. It is stitched in outline stitch with the highlights in a brighter yellow and split back stitch.

You can get the patten to embroider your own text from Joy To The World over on Wild Olive. Mollie also has "Repeat the Sounding Joy" and " Wonders of His Love" patterns and they're all avaliable as PDFs and have a Creative Commons license on them so head on over and check them out.

Don't embroider yourself or don't have time to embroider right now? I have decided to give away this embroidery.

What do you get?

One lucky winner will get this embroidery stitched with cotton thread on a soft cotton fabric in a plastic display hoop. I will send it anywhere in the world so you can enter where ever you live. I will be posting this off next week but it is coming from Australia and for other countries I can't guarantee it will get there before Christmas. There should be plenty of time but the postal systems at this time of year get a bit bogged down.

How do you enter?

To win you just have to head over to my Wallflowerarts etsy shop and then comment back here and let me know what your favourite item in my shop is. Comment here by Midday Tuesday 11th December (Australia EST) and you will be in the draw. Tuesday afternoon I'll use a number randomiser to pick a winner. Make sure to leave me some way to contact you so I can get an address to send the embroidery to.
For an extra entry you could promote the giveaway with a link here from Facebook, Twitter or your blog. Just let me know in the comments.
Good Luck.

Tomorrow I will blog about the process of embroidering this pattern with progress photos

Saturday, December 1, 2012

With a spate of hot days here in Australia I'm afraid my ability to do anything goes out the window. Heat causes a lot of my health problems to get a lot worse and I've just not had the brain to do anything.
Both Ruth and I have a lot of trouble with the heat and we're not able to have an air conditioner here in the cottage so things pretty much crawled to a stop this past week.

For now I'll look back at one of my most successful needle felting projects. A friend of ours is totally in love with Polar Bears. I decided to needle felt her one for birthday/Christmas present.

It took me a lot longer than I thought it would but most of my needle felting projects at that point had been rather small like the teeny sheep.
The Polar Bear was slightly bigger than my fist.

I started with a pipe cleaner armature and from there built it up until I could get the right shape.
A felting needle has barbs along it and when you insert it into wool it tangles the fibres together. You can use this to create a 3D sculpture or to felt wool in to a piece of felt to create a 2D picture.
Unfortunatly this project was done at a time when my good old Konika-Minolta stopped working (Well it was the lens that went but I couldn't afford a new one) so there aren't any progress photos.

I looked at a fair few photos to try and get the shape right. I didn't realise until I was part way through the project how few photos there are of Polar Bears from above.

By coincidence, while I was still working on it, we ended up seeing part of a Polar Bear documentary and although I was really sick with a migraine that night I saw enough from various angles to be able to correct the anatomy a bit.

I'm not completely happy with his paws. The toes aren't really long enough but by that point I wasn't able to fix them.

Over all though I was very happy with the completed bear. He has a great personality that shines through and our friend was over the moon with him and that's what counts.

I am available for needle felted sculpture commissions. Something of this size and complexity would cost a couple of hundred dollars. If you are interested you can email me at wallflowerarts@gmail.com for more information.

About Me

Emma and Ruth live with their pets in a tiny pre 1870's cottage in the remote mining town of Hill End, central west NSW.
Surrounded by books, wool, fruit trees, animals and the beautiful red clays and Australian Bush there is much to inspire them.
They both use creating and art as a way to deal with chronic illnesses and disability and to bring beauty and happiness into the world.
The need to create has always been a part of both of them and their focus at the moment has been on knitting, spinning, needle felting, crochet, photography, dyeing and beaded jewellery